I make it no secret that I appreciate a really good art style in a cartoon or even a comic, but one aspect of such that really catches my eye is when the backgrounds have a particularly unique look to them that give them an added look of depth and even warmth, as opposed to backgrounds that are flat, simple, and basic. The biggest contributing factor in this for me, and one that some of you may have seen the influence of in my own comics, is texture.

For me, this fascination started with David Feiss's work, specifically beginning with the second season of COW AND CHICKEN and onward, when his backgrounds suddenly took on this really interesting “marble” texture to them that I hadn't seen in cartoon backgrounds before.



The first season never had this marble texture, the colors were always just flat and simple; this to me marked an unexpected improvement in COW AND CHICKEN's art style that continued in not only ensuing seasons, but also in Feiss's other work, such as I AM WEASEL, and his LOST CAT pilot that was never picked up for series.

Then you have somebody like John R. Dilworth, who really took it up a notch by not only adding texture to the backgrounds in his work, but photorealistic textures at that, which you rarely saw in traditional 2D animation; he began experimenting with such in some of his early short films like THE DIRDY BIRDY, but he clearly had perfected it with COURAGE THE COWARDLY DOG.



And it's not just the photorealistic textures of Dilworth's backgrounds that are amazing, but also the attention to color and lighting that not only make the backgrounds and overaall atmosphere of his work realistic, but believable as well. He has said that when it comes to his animated work, especially Courage, his approach has always been cinematic, and it definitely shows, as the blending of mixed media creates a world all its own that really set Courage and his other work apart. As some of you can probably tell, Dilworth in particular had a tremendously huge influence on my own art style, especially with VAMPIRE GIRL.

Then we have scenarios where cartoonists try to capture a certain look from another art medium and adapt it into the animation medium. Growing up, Chris Savino loved newspaper comic strips, and has often tried to emulate the look and feel of old funny papers in a lot of his work - the most notable of which is THE LOUD HOUSE, which really pays homage to the funny papers with not only character designs that you might find in the panels of such, but how the backgrounds have a very obvious newsprint texture to them.



I also heartell that Savino wanted to go a step further and have the entire show colored in halftone style to further emphasize the influence of printed newspaper comic strips (i.e. those tiny colored dots that create the illusion of particular shades), but was advised against it not looking particularly good on TV screens.

Then you have instances where popular storybooks are adapted into animated series, and try to capture the style of the source material's illustrations, which Cinar did paricularly well back in the day with such shows they adapted from books, like THE BUSY WORLD OF RICHARD SCARRY, and of course, ARTHUR.



ARTHUR's backgrounds were always painted with watercoloring effects, which definitely captures the look of Marc Brown's illustrations from the original books - it was particularly noticeable and effective in the earliest seasons that were still hand-drawn.

So yeah, like I say, for me, I just really appreciate when cartoonists and artists go that extra mile and add just an extra little bit of texture to their backgrounds; it's just so much more visually interesting and appealing to me and my personal taste than plain backgrounds are.

And sometimes a well chosen texture can make up for a lack of fully rendered detail. It can be a narrowly focused suggestion of the background as opposed to every little thing in its place or a blank bare wall.

What do I want to convey, how little or how much is necessary to get that across? Do I want every little thing that is there or just an impression of what is there? Is is a question of mood or substance?

A texture can do that. Great points.

Ha, I really dislaked all those cartoons but the backgrounds were indeed ok, you are right. but it made the ugly art of the characters stand out more XD

In a similar vein there's this Instagram account dedicated to the background artists of old Scooby Doo!
https://www.instagram.com/scooby_scapes/

They had the same sorts of weirdly drawn flat characters over complex, toned, and shaded painterly backgrounds.

Animes from the 80s and 90s mostly had backgrounds that looked like watercolor (or some other form of painting, IDK), which created a very stark but nice contrast with the main characters



modern day anime IMHO changed style but this happened slowly, I can't tell when.

I always wanted to have a similar contrast in my comics, but I certainly can't do anything that looks even vaguely painterly, so what I did was to use the “pen” tool for characters (width depends on pressure) and the “marker” tool for backgrounds (fixed width). And playing a bit with colors.
But I really would like to have some filter or some trick or something to have my backrounds look more “painterly”.

There are any number of filters in Photoshop and Gimp that mimic painting in many different styles. I've played with them a lot but I'm too wedded to the detail in the images. I've actually painted backgrounds in Photoshop for a couple of my comics – and no one has ever noticed. So I consider it a self indulgence like my meta inside jokes and character crossovers.

I've always liked the indistinct water color backgrounds. My favorite was always Disney's Fox and the Hound. I think that's Don Bluth and he might have been a big influence. The most memorable background was an episode of the 1967 Spider-Man. It was this nightmare of brush strokes in watercolor washes of black, white and red. That shows up in Ralph Bakshi movies like Wizards and Lord of the Rings.

Ozoneocean wrote:
Ha, I really dislaked all those cartoons

I had no idea any of those shows took place on lakes! :P

Okay, I get that COW AND CHICKEN and COURAGE THE COWARDLY DOG are not for everyone, but come on, how can anyone hate Arthuza?

Im only one man. Ill draw a single line or a gradient, and youll like it.


edit: I think i was musing about not being able to get the right search terms to find background inspo on here last year. My folder for inspiration is like, 4 pngs. When I was looking though, I was looking at the 60s cartoons. There's a whole style name for it, and they overplayed it hard. And mimicking it myself is also probably cliche. It makes for a bit of fun for a page, if I had the time to attempt it though.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
I had no idea any of those shows took place on lakes! :P

Well Angry Beavers did LOL! XD
Also, Total Drama Island. I loved that show…
Neither use painterly BGs though.

but come on, how can anyone hate Arthuza?

I didn't hate any of those, I just didn't like them XP
Arthur was weird to me because it was too much like the books, plus I wasn't the target audience, being way too old for it. I didn't dislike that one though.

-With anime part of the issue was the movement to doing all the art on computer so they just got lazy and used flat colours (at MOST they'll just use gradients and some standard textures), and often now they even use 3D :(

In the old days the standard was a painted BG that was oversized so the “camera” could pan and even zoom into it while the characters moved over it. It worked super surprisingly well for a flat thing but because it looked so great you didn't care that it was flat.
Now with the new 3D environments it looks like things are happening in a cardboard set,the mismatch with the character art is too great so that it rarely works well.